


What Waves Cannot Take

by Hokuto



Category: Nation - Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Reality, Character of Color, F/M, Love, Marriage, Sweet, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:50:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suppose that Daphne's father didn't find the island right after the Raiders...  A might-have-been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Waves Cannot Take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kezya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kezya/gifts).



> Happy wintery holidays, Kezya! *heart* I hope you enjoy this... it was a pleasure to write for you, and a great honor to participate in Yuletide at last! Nation is one of my favorite of Pratchett's latest works, and trying to get into Mau and Daphne's heads at least a bit was a fun challenge.

The wave had taken a lot of things. Courtship rituals had been one of them.

Mau hadn't had the chance to figure them out; they were one of those things you were supposed to learn as a man, and, well, that hadn't gone quite as planned. He had gathered some things, though, as a boy. You were supposed to go hunting with the woman's father at least once, so you could impress him with your ability to provide food, but it was even more important to talk to her mother and get on her good side with gifts or flattery. And then all the men would talk about it, and all the women would discuss it, and after they had talked it over, her parents would be willing to talk to your parents - not you - and they'd get everything sorted out: who would give whom what gifts, where the new couple would live, when the priest thought was the best time for a ceremony...

For some reason talking to the woman you liked didn't come into it much.

The system had worked, or Mau assumed it had; his parents had been very fond of each other, anyway, and overall there hadn't been many problems among the Nation at large, at least not ones Mau had noticed. But the wave had broken it all down.

Mau had thought about asking some of the other men - Milo surely knew how things ought to go, and Pilu was always hinting at things - but he could never think of a good way to bring the subject up. There were certain boundaries, he was discovering, that were one-way; it was all right for even a perfectly competent person to ask a chief how something should be done, but the chief should never be seen asking anyone how to do anything.* This seemed to be especially true of personal matters. People assumed that he knew what to do already, and even vaguely hinting otherwise was enough to earn him some terrible looks. The Grandfathers had yelled about rituals and ceremonies a lot, but never specifics, and now they were silent, so that option was out, too.

It was confusing, going from boy to chief with no steps in between. Anyway Daphne's father had yet to appear and was probably not the sort to be impressed by Mau's hunting skills, or Mau himself for that matter. The trousermen had completely different rules for everything, and Mau doubted that marriage would be the exception.

When Mau woke up after the Raiders had gone, he thought, _maybe it doesn't matter._ He'd been making up the rules all the time anyway, he could make up these rules, too. They'd been saving each other's lives since they'd met; that was almost as good as a ritual, when you thought about it. So when the ghost girl said, "How could I go back to my life before?" he said, "Don't."

"What?" said Daphne.

"Don't go back," Mau said. "Stay here with me, help us, keep making beer and saving lives - but stay." And he added, softly, "Please. Will you be my wife?"

He waited an endless moment for her response.

*In private was another matter, but as more people arrived, the scarcer privacy became.

* * *

The wave had taken a lot of things. Daphne's sense of propriety hadn't been one of them.

At first it had been all she had, and she'd clung to it as if it were a solid rock in the wave's backwash, keeping her in place. She'd baked and made tea and kept on all her clothes no matter how hot it was and written invitations and thought of her position, and in the back of her head there was always her grandmother's voice preparing to say "Ahem," if not already saying it.

There were probably better things to which Daphne could have clung, but propriety was, besides science, what she knew best. No single wave, however large, could wash it away.

A succession of smaller ones had done a good job of eroding it, though. Making beer, the grass skirt, teaching herself doctoring out of the surgeon's manual - none of it was even close to "proper" behavior for a young lady, and Daphne found herself caring not at all, no matter how many times she heard that harsh "Ahem" in her head. But she couldn't throw it all away, because that would be throwing away a bit of herself, too; not her favorite part of herself, but it had gotten her through the wave and those first days after, and that had to be worth something.

So when Mau said, "Will you be my wife?", Daphne was as surprised as anyone to hear "Yes" come out of her mouth.

"I mean, no!" she said, her face going red and her grandmother yelling in her head, all kinds of words that Daphne really wished she couldn't remember right now.

"Which?" Mau asked.

"Both! Oh - I don't know..." She pulled her arms back and wrapped them around herself. "I'm not - I don't know -" _Too young, too scared, not ready, **everything**..._

"I'm sorry," Mau said. "I don't know how trousermen do these things. Is there a special way to ask? Do I have to ask your father?"

"Well, yes," Daphne said, "but that's not the problem. He isn't here, anyway. I - I think I need to think about this." And she stood up and fled back to the Women's Place.

As she sat with Cahle and the Papervine Woman, making beer, she thought, _That probably could have gone better._ Off the top of her head she couldn't think of a way, though; why did Mau have to go and _say_ that, out loud, where it would wake up her grandmother in her head just when Daphne had thought she might be able to ignore her for good? It wasn't fair; she wasn't ready; she was far too young to be thinking about marr- about getting marr- about that sort of thing!

She told it all to Cahle, but Cahle just smiled and said, "Demon boy will make good husbun. Chief's wife is a very good thing to be!"

"But I'm not old enough!" Daphne said, which was the least objectionable of her grandmother's possible objections.

"How old are you?"

Daphne spat in the bowl of mother-of-beer in front of her, and thought about it. _Old enough to make alcohol_, she thought, _to help a baby be born, to make tremendously important historical discoveries, to cut off a person's foot and cauterize it with hot tar and not have to throw up till later..._

And still not old enough to be married.

Eventually she went back down to the beach, where Mau was weaving a fishing-net, mercifully well apart from everyone else. She sat down beside him and gently said, "I think the holes are a little too big."

Mau looked at the net, which would have had a difficult time keeping in anything big enough to be worth eating. "Oh. Well," he said, "we have plenty of nets anyway, I suppose..."

"I've thought about it," said Daphne. "What you said, that is."

Mau didn't say anything, which only made it harder, but Daphne pulled together her courage and went on. "I think - I think that I'm not ready yet," she said, "but there's a trousermen custom for that. They - we call it an 'engagement'."

"What does an engagement do?" Mau asked.

"It's like being married before you get married," Daphne said. "I mean, you aren't married, but everyone expects that you will be and acts a bit as if you already are. But either person can still change their mind..."

Mau rolled up the net, thinking. At last he said, "That's good enough. Let's do an engagement."

* * *

A month later they were married. Pilu cried, and blamed it on the smoke from the _Judy's_ lamps, which had never done anything so improper in their lives.

"It's all right," Mau said, and took a bowl of shrimp to share with Daphne whenever Cahle stopped giving her advice. The food seemed endless; it was almost enough to make him worry about the days to come, except that today it was hard to be worried about anything. "Maybe if I let you borrow the trousers, you can find a wife too..."

"I don't need trousers for that," Pilu said, wiping his face. "It's just - you know, it's a wedding! And about time, too - we needed one around here..."

"I know," said Mau. There had been births and deaths and a lot of survival, but no one had gotten married. It was a completion, of a sort; not the only possible one, but Mau was happy enough with it.

Daphne came back red-faced, sat down beside him, and grabbed a handful of the shrimp, muttering something about completely inappropriate stories and she didn't _need_ any pantomimes, thank you very much. Mau smiled, and she gave him a strange look.

"What is it?"

"You don't do that very much," she said. "Smile, I mean."

He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, and said softly, "I think that's going to change..."

"I should certainly hope so," said Daphne, and kissed him back, much more firmly.

Maybe Cahle's pantomimes were useful after all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [What Waves Cannot Take [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6497953) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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